SYMCO 2009--Day 1st (6/27)

(6/27)Today is the official arrival day, although i've heard that some guys were already been here for some days. I arrived in South Africa at the early morning(about 7 o'clock) of 6/27 amd soon got to the post office in the airport. The first one I saw was Kaori Ota, the very nice girl from Japan.^0^'' Actually we've already met on facebook for some times and have discussed how to choose the plug types or stuff like that on line. (Although in the end both of our plugs were useless in SA. HAHAHA~~The plug there are indeed 3 round holes, but...bigger than we thought.)
The first meal in SA was pizza, the lunch. We sit and had our lunch in circles and chat. The afternoon itinerary was tour guide of the Onderstepoort Faculty of Vet Science.(I still can't pronounce that word now even though the symposium had already closed for months.)
The guide of our small meercat groups was a committee member called Rikus. We visited their anatomy room, school hospital and farm. I was very surprice to see their very huge anatomy room. It's about 8~10 times bigger than ours!!Am I exaggerating??? Uhh...Maybe memories beautify the facts, or their tall ceiling made the room looked much higher? But~ Anyway, it's much much bigger than NTU's.

And the studant there are so lucky to have the samples like lion, rhino, cheetah, elephant,etc. They told me the students can't really "cut" those reaserch purpose sample, but at least they have chances to closely observe. Be frankly, during the tour guide I was struugling for Rikus's heavy Afican accent~~><''I'm not pretty sure if that is his problem or mine, (maybe mine are for most part.XD)but anyway those 2

At night there was Opening Banquet, but actually I had a terrible time different(6 hours) and hardly had any sleep on the plane. So~~very very tired in the end...almost fell into sleep.(But I still danced a little bit~^^'')We stayed in their student apartment tonight, there are all single room. I was very lucky to have a wonderful neighbor, Karin, lived in the next door. It seems that we are the only two girls lived in the first floor.(All other girls stayed in the upper floor.)We are really good neighbor and it was so lucky for me to know her in the first day.: )

(Photo: from SYMCO 2009 authorities)